The Reckoning. Christie Ridgway

out, her hips swishing with a sassy little twitch.

      That womanly touch was almost worth being called sweet. Almost.

      “Don’t fool yourself,” he called after her. “I’m cynical. Cold. Distant. Determined. Just wait and I’ll prove it to you.”

      The bathroom door closing was her answer.

      He was still smiling—smiling again!—when his cell phone rang. It sat on a low table he’d pushed to the side of the room, so he made a long reach for it.

      “Jamison, here.”

      “And here, too,” a voice said.

      Emmett forgot about spring and sunshine. Darkness closed in on him again. He felt it, smelled it, sensed the sulfur whiff of evil in the air. Striding to the doorway of the exercise room, he glanced down the hall to keep watch on the bathroom door. To make sure Linda was safe.

      “Where the hell are you, Jason?”

      “Do you think I called to tell you, little brother? Then you’re stupider than I thought.”

      Emmett gritted his teeth at his brother’s taunting. In a perverse sense, Jason was entitled to his arrogance. The police had had him in custody once and then he’d escaped to kidnap Lily Fortune. Later, even with experienced men like Emmett in the mix, the FBI had lost him during the ransom exchange. And an agent had lost his life.

      “We figured you’d be on your way to the South Pacific or South America with the ransom money by now,” Emmett said, calming his voice.

      “You’d like me out of the country, wouldn’t you?”

      What Emmett would like was to find his brother and stop him once and for all. It was what he’d vowed to do. Cynical, cold, distant, determined. If Linda could look inside him right now, she’d have no doubt about the kind of man he was.

      “I’d like to know why you called, Jason.”

      “I read this morning’s Red Rock newspaper.”

      There was a clue. His brother was near enough to Red Rock to have easy access to the local paper. What it might have said, though, Emmett had no idea. Since he was in San Antonio now, he read the San Antonio paper. But Jason couldn’t know what city he was in and Emmett certainly wasn’t about to tell him. His brother was smart enough without providing him any aid. “I didn’t get a chance to read it yet myself.”

      “Didn’t get a chance to read it,” Jason mocked, his voice rising. “You don’t need to read it to know that Ryan Fortune left you a bundle of cash and stock options.”

      Apparently some of the details of Ryan’s will had been leaked to the press. It might have irritated Emmett if it hadn’t also brought Jason out of the woodwork. “Hey, it wasn’t my choice, Jase. That was Ryan’s doing.”

      “Why should you get any of the Fortune money when it was me who worked so hard for it?”

      Jason had thought himself entitled to the Fortune wealth since they were kids, and their grandfather, Farley Jamison, had been obsessed with the money as a means to fund his grandiose political aspirations. “But you have some of the Fortune money—Lily’s ransom,” Emmett pointed out.

      “I don’t care about that,” Jason snapped.

      Emmett frowned. “You don’t care about the money?”

      “Not as much as I care about taking you down, little brother. Keep looking over your shoulder, Emmett, because I’m coming after you. Then I’ll have my reward. And my revenge.”

      The call clicked off. Emmett remained standing, staring at the phone in his hand. Well, well, well. This put a new spin on things.

      The man Emmett had promised himself to stop had just promised to stop him.

      Fine, he thought.

      May the best man win.

      Four

      Emmett sat at the kitchen table the next morning, the last of a pot of coffee now a final swallow in the bottom of his mug. The dregs of black liquid were as dark as his mood after a sleepless night going over Jason’s phone call.

      I’m coming after you, his brother had said.

      As if Emmett were like the proverbial sitting duck, waiting for his brother to take him out.

      He wasn’t afraid of Jason. But there was no doubt the other man was wily and Emmett had others to think of besides himself. However, Jason didn’t have a clue as to where Emmett was residing at the moment and would never think to look for him in the Armstrong’s guest house. Jason didn’t know that the older couple or Ricky and Linda even existed, so Emmett was reasonably sure they were safe from Jason’s latest threat.

      But damn, the truth was Emmett was just sitting around.

      Taking care of this promise regarding Linda meant he wasn’t taking care of the problem that was Jason. It put the ball in his brother’s court—I’m coming after you—and Emmett didn’t like it. At all. He was used to controlling the action, not letting others control him.

      “G’morning.”

      His gaze lifted in time to see a sleepy-eyed Linda enter the room. She was wearing a thick robe and terry-cloth slippers, had bedhead and a pillowcase crease across her left cheek.

      He grunted, tightening his grip on his coffee mug as desire pinballed through his system. For some inconvenient reason, she gave him a bad case of the gimmes.

      She squinched her eyes at him and pushed back a hank of her iron-straight, golden hair. “You are Emmett Jamison, yes?”

      Was this another symptom of her brain injury? Had she forgotten him, or was she joking around? “The last I checked, that’s me.”

      She nodded. “Good. I thought so, but the way you greeted me set me off my stride for a second.”

      “The way I greeted you?”

      “That cheerful good morning grunt.”

      “Oh.” She was joking around. “Sorry.”

      Her hand waved. “No apology necessary. I’m not much of a morning person myself. It’s just that after I came out of my…condition, I found myself often confused by new and unfamiliar faces. So I learned to gauge whether I was already acquainted with someone by the warmth of their response to me. Yours was a sort of stranger-type grunt.”

      Funny, how she could make him half grin and feel guilty at the same time. Then more guilty when he saw that she was staring at the now-empty coffeepot. “Let me,” he said, starting to rise.

      “No, no, no.” She waved him down again. “I can do this. I can make coffee. We had a practice kitchen in rehab. Like kindergarten class, you know? We played house in order to relearn how to do simple tasks.”

      He watched her trudge to the counter. She pulled close the bean grinder he’d left on the tiled surface and lifted off the clear plastic top to reveal plenty of freshly ground beans. Then she removed the basket from the coffeemaker. Inside was the used filter and a mess of wet grounds.

      She stared at them. Then her gaze moved to the grinder. Back to the full basket.

      Like yesterday in the grocery store, he could feel the confusion radiate off her slim body. Her spine became as straight as a steel rod, and her shoulders looked stiff. Something in the middle of his chest hurt.

      He was almost out of his chair when she spoke, her voice tight. “Remind me again. What should I do?”

      Breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding slid out of him in a silent whoosh. “Throw the old grounds and filter into the wastebasket under the sink,” he said, careful to keep his voice free of anything but information. “We put the fresh filters in that clear jar over there by the grinder.”

      She